Linaro 12.04 Release with Kernel 3.4 and Android 4.0.4

Linaro has just released version 12.04 based on Linux Kernel 3.4-rc3 and Android 4.0.4_r1.1.

This release already provides Ubuntu 12.04 LTS images for Pandaboard, Snowball, Origen and Versatile Express, and all community builds (nano, ALIP…) are based on Ubuntu Precise Pangolin as well. This should provide significant performance boosted compared to Ubuntu 11.10 thanks to hard-float support and other optimization (See Phoronix Benchmarks). A lot of work since to have gone into big.LITTLE implementation, HTML5 is now supported in Firefox, and it seems Linaro is still working on ARMv6 as they provided VP8 optimizations and improved the toolchain for this architecture.

cpufreq-based thermal management work is merged for i.MX and Origen platforms.

cpuidle was refreshed for all members platforms since several patches have now been accepted in Linux 3.4 Kernel.

Toolchain

Our first GCC 4.7 based release, including updates to GCC 4.7.0+svn186061.

Better use of 16 bit Thumb-2 instructions for smaller code size.

Implements 64 bit ones complement in NEON.

Adds support for the ARMv6 saturation instructions.

Backports the NEON lexer improvements for faster compilation.

Backports the 64 bit multiply, divide, and mod improvements.

ppoll syscall now supported in ARM linux-user mode.

The SETEND instruction in the Thumb encoding now UNDEFs to match behaviour for the ARM encoding.

The OMAP36xx UART FIFO status registers are now implemented.

gdbserver can now be compiled with Android’s toolchain.

Additional fixes from the GDB 7.4 branch, one of them being that it doesn’t require makeinfo to build anymore.

Binary toolchain switched to the new GCC 4.7 based Linaro GCC. It adds native language support to most of the programs and also the mudflap, ssp, and gomp runtime libraries. gnu_unique_object support in GCC is enabled.

Validation

Support added for custom android command.

tjbench support added to lava-android-test. The results are available on validation.linaro.org.

Here are the known issues for this release (All for Android and none for Ubuntu…) :